


Ottava Rima

by luvanderwon



Series: SurvIvory [1]
Category: Havemercy Series - Jaida Jones & Danielle Bennett
Genre: Post-Canon Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-10
Updated: 2014-08-10
Packaged: 2018-02-12 14:25:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2113308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luvanderwon/pseuds/luvanderwon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A reply to Hopes Up by moonix. Post-Steelhands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ottava Rima

**Author's Note:**

  * For [moonix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonix/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Hopes Up](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2050533) by [moonix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonix/pseuds/moonix). 



They bring him back under an umbrella. It’s a covert thing, a quiet operation through a tumult of August rain and re-growth. He’s reading, when they deliver him, stretched out on a window seat and refusing to think about old words; about tracing sonnets into pale skin with his finger tips. Thinking doesn’t help anybody. Thinking cannot bring back the dead, until it can, today; in the rain while he reads Shakespeare. 

The hallway feels like a gauntlet with twelve steps to run between the two of them, and too many shadows: the tangible, frightening fusion of a dream with a nightmare. Raphael can’t remember which one is better. 

“But you were – you’re supposed to be,” he says, and the stranger – who has no right being strange – eyes the streaks of grey in his hair which hadn’t been there before. 

“So were you,” he replies, “they told me.”

Raphael’s hands are shaking, and he licks his lips, a nervous tic which was there, a long time ago, but never when they were face to face with no one else around. “But I saw you,” he whispers, and his voice is hollow, a bell without a clapper. “There was...” he hesitates; coughs the word like it hurts his throat: “fire.”

Ivory shrugs, and tries to be calculating. “Cassio--” he starts, but it’s no good, the word gets caught in the back of his mouth, impaled on the points of his teeth. He swallows. “There was always a lot of fire,” he remembers, softly. 

Afterwards, in the space the broken months has left between them, he will flex his fingers; open his palm and say “it didn’t burn me,” but that’s not yet. 

Raphael takes three steps and pauses, breathes through his nose; tries to remember. This is not Ghislain turning up on the beach with his roar and his flags and his ridiculous pirating schemes, this is not a free ride home and _fancy-seeing-you-here_. Back there, in the village, Raphael hadn’t known who was dead and who was alive; some days he’d assumed nobody else made it. Others he’d told himself they all had, and he just needed to wait. Someone would come. 

And Ghislain had come, and he’d told Raphael softly, on the boat that first night, words wet with the salt-spittle of the sea. Raphael hadn’t felt like admitting that it wasn’t the waves which made him seasick, it was the news about his former comrades. 

He feels sick again, now, the heavy, unsettled nausea of being displaced; faced with a body he hasn’t finished grieving over. 

It’s Ivory who closes the gap between them in the hallway, takes nine more steps and closes one cold hand around Raphael’s wrist. There isn’t enough air in Raphael’s chest, and all he can think about is the words he was reading, upstairs, the smudged black ink on creamy parchment – ottava rima and a quiet crescendo of iambics; his own anchor. It hurts, deep behind his navel, and Ivory folds himself around Raphael’s shoulders without letting go of his wrist, digs long fingers into his greying hair and presses cool lips against his temple. 

That night, the sky is a sickly off-white which reminds Raphael of ash and chalk mines. Rain hammers against the thin window panes, purple and angry and incessant, ribbons of water tumbling over the lips of roofs, turning Thremedon into a waterfall. Ivory curls against his side, shivering closer with each flash of lightning, the thin streak of his body cool and scarred and hungry against Raphael’s ribs. 

Conversely, for someone who spread fire through the skies, Ivory has always been alarmed by thunder storms.

**Author's Note:**

> Shakespeare is universal, don't fight it. I don't think he ever wrote in ottava rima, though, but maybe that's how he was translated in Volstovic.


End file.
